Leslie, removing his hat and lifting his treasure trove, held her up for exhibition.
The girls laughed and spoke to her; had they been English girls she would have been promptly handed round and kissed; and she, with becoming gravity, replied gracefully in a few half-lisped words.
Then, leaving behind them on the air a cloud of dust, a perfume of camellia oil, and a long drawn “Sayonara,” the bevy of beauties passed in a gorgeous flight of mixed colors round the bend of the road and were gone.
“Ye mind he said seven rikshas were coming,” cried Mac.
“Bother!” answered Leslie. “He’d come the same direction and passed them. Do you think they’d have laughed and spoken to her if there was anything wrong and they’re Japs, and ought to know. Come! buck up, man! You’re not afraid to do what a girl has done?”
“A’weel!” said M’Gourley, half ashamed of himself; and dour as any Procurator Fiscal, he set to the examination of the being who was now on the ground again, her hand clasped in that of Leslie.
This was the result of the examination. Deponent lived with her father. Where? She did not know.—Just beyond there somewhere. What was the house like she lived in? It had a plum-tree growing before it. What did her father do? He hammered things with a hammer. Had she any brothers and sisters? No; but—sudden thought—she had a sugar-candy dragon, and she had lost it. (Here deponent wept slightly and with reserve.)
Pause in the interrogations whilst a snub nose was wiped with Leslie’s pocket handkerchief.
And a kite, but that was at home. She had gone that day with a little boy—a neighbor—to hunt for the saccharine dragon, and they had lost themselves, then they had lost each other, then she had lost herself. How was that possible? Well, she had gone to sleep. Where? In the wood.
Here the examinate went off into a tale about an impossible tom-cat with wings, which she had once seen on an umbrella, and beheld once again in the wood, but was suppressed by the court and asked to keep to facts.